


Open Up My Eyes In Wonder

by Vashti (tvashti)



Category: Mercy Thompson Series - Patricia Briggs
Genre: Canon Character of Color, Chromatic Yuletide, F/M, Family, Family Feels, Fluff, Jesse is a minor character, Married Couple, Misses Clause Challenge, Native American Character(s), Yuletide, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-16
Updated: 2019-12-16
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,442
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21814750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tvashti/pseuds/Vashti
Summary: “Mercy...Why are we here?  And don’t tell me it’s because my team lost to you at CAGCTBPBT.""Remember that scene from that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter movie Jesse made us a watch a couple of months ago?"Adam’s eyebrows quirked.  “We drove over five hours so you could recreate a movie scene?  A five second movie scene.”I chuckled.  “Well when you put it that way...”  But that wasn’t really the reason
Relationships: Adam Hauptman/Mercy Thompson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Open Up My Eyes In Wonder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlexElizabeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexElizabeth/gifts).



> As one cheap reader to another, I totally understand the dilemma of being _desperately anxious!_ for the next book, but also not even willing to seriously to consider buying it. Libraries are made of gold, but they're an exercise in patience :D As such, I give you the caveat that I didn't have the stories on hand to refer to when I was writing this. Thank God for the good fans at Hurog and the Aspen Creek Wiki for all the detailed info they’ve collected on the verse. I hope this fills the bill.
> 
> Happy Yuletide!

Adam took a desultory lick of his ice cream cone—it was either that or let it melt down his hand—and cut his eyes at his wife...his far too chipper wife. 

That would be me. I’m the far too chipper wife, Mercy. I’m not usually this perky, but today was special.

“How exactly did you convince me to do this with you again?” 

My eyebrows rose. “Um, convince you? I didn’t convince you.”

“Oh.”

“I beat you fair and square at CAGCTBPBT. And beach day at Cohasset was my bounty.”

Adam, my far-too-handsome-for-everyone’s-good husband, narrowed his eyes. “Oh. Right.” There’s something about holding, and eating, a dripping ice cream cone that makes it hard to simultaneously hold onto a bad mood, though. Which was why we were eating ice cream instead of digging into the very nice picnic I had prepared and packed myself. I’m pretty amazing when it comes to baked goods and fair to middling with any other kind of meals, but basic picnic food? I could hold my own at a picnic. 

Why baked goods? Blame my foster mother, Evelyn. When you’re the only coyote in a wolf pack, you learn lots of tricks for managing...lots of things. You’d be amazed how much mischief and/or aggression can be worked out in while punching dough. The average wolf is bigger, stronger and faster than a coyote—meaner, too. Coyotes are trickier though. I’m pretty sure it was that trickiness that my foster mother was trying to subvert. There may or may not have been an incident with peanut butter on the expensive car seat of an alpha werewolf prompting her.

Did I mention that I’m a coyote skinwalker raised by werewolves in the alpha pack of all the North American werewolves? And that I’m currently married to the alpha of another werewolf pack? 

Look, it’s my life and  _ I _ think it’s a lot to explain. Don’t get me wrong, I could but...no. It would just do a disservice to the parts of my life that are actually strange.

So here I am sitting with my very handsome werewolf husband, Jesse (our step/daughter) and her boyfriend chasing waves, while licking an ice cream cone and enjoying the view spread at our sandy feet. I looked over at Adam. “Not enjoying yourself?”

His answer was a surprisingly aggressive lick of his ice cream cone that made me warm for reasons that had nothing at all to do with the bright sunshine. 

“That much, huh?” 

Adam actually turned to look at me. “Really, Mercy. A beach? You know how wolves feel about beaches.”

I do. They almost unilaterally hate beaches. Unlike their non-supernatural cousins, werewolves can’t swim—not without help. They’re pure muscle. There’s enough fat in their bodies to keep them performing at peak condition at all times, but not enough to float. Except for the handful of packs worldwide that are based on islands or coastal areas, the average werewolf avoids large bodies of water like a house cat. Mind you, that doesn’t keep them out of the navy or search & rescue positions, but it does mean they’re the first ones to advocate for water safety. You only think a mom with six kids is serious about life vests.

“There’s more to the beach than water, Adam,” I reminded him.

He quirked an eyebrow at me. I love it when he does that. I hate it, too, because we’re probably disagreeing about something, but— Have I mentioned that my husband is unfairly handsome? Did I also happen to mention that, at that moment, he was shirtless and in board shorts, slowly licking an ice cream cone to death? 

What was I thinking?

“Keep staring at me like that,” he said, between licks, “and this beach trip won’t last much longer.”

I know werewolves can smell everything. I know it like I know my name, like I know how many bolts were holding my old VW Rabbit together before it was totaled, but that didn’t stop me from being insanely attracted to my husband. And  _ he _ knew  _ that _ .

Just as I was starting to think that maybe this beach thing wasn’t such a good plan after all, Adam waggled his brows at me.

Best. Idea. Ever.

Adam laughed. When I said that wolves can smell everything, I meant everything. I’m sure my happily horny hormones were creating a giddy cloud around our towel. And that was okay. It was more than okay, it was pretty great. (I’m too embarrassed to admit what was zinging along our mating bond.)

It’s been a rough couple of years for us--not just me and Adam personally, but pretty much everyone we knew and loved. There had been losses of the permanent kind, and symbolic political losses. Along the way we’d lost a naivete I’m sure none of us thought it was possible to still have, and a sense that we, as a pack, were inviolable. 

I have no idea what my lifespan is, thanks to my less-than-conventional parentage, but werewolves really are near immortal. In the grand scheme of things, though, lots of old dogs die. You’d be surprised what Mother Nature can do when she’s really determined. And it’s nearly impossible to recover from being blown to smithereens. Some of the wolves go mad and have to be put down by the Marrok. Every few decades, a group of knowledgeable but terrified band of regular humans get a posse together and start hunting wolves. (Until recently, they’d only been dangerous to lone wolves. Which is terrible. Every life is precious, and there are few things I can imagine worse than dying alone with no one to at least wonder what’s happened to you. No one should be forgotten.) Vampires will take down werewolves if they can, less so in North America, but they’re nothing if not opportunists. 

To be honest, for a long time wolves were their own worst enemy. Bran, the Marrok, had put a stop to that in North America when he brought all the wolves under his power. So what happened to our pack--nearly all of them taken at once--that was something new and deeply unsettling.

Which says nothing about our new and evolving issues with the fae, tentative alliances with the local vampire seethe, me being stolen from our home...

The world, usually so slow and ponderous when it comes to the supernatural, was changing at an insane rate. Almost like we were getting ready for something. A big, bad something.

So, yeah, happy horny interest in my ice cream molesting, shirtless husband? Pretty fantastic, if you ask me.

Stretching just so, I waggled my eyebrows at Adam. I’m not usually so bold in public. There are a lot of issues there, and even if there weren’t Adam was born before PDAs were a thing to be endured and snarked at. So putting the moves on Adam? In public? Not usually my thing. Luckily on purpose, our towel was out of the way of the main beach crowd, which made me a little more comfortable. “Maybe we should have rented a private cabana.”

To which Adam instantly flushed and sent a wave of happily horny hormones of his own. It’s not on the level of a werewolf’s, but I get by with my little coyote nose. 

Did I mention our mating bond? Yeah, still too embarrassed to share. 

I took a long lick of my own ice cream cone, my eyes never leaving Adam’s.

“Mercy...” he growled.

I grinned at him before dropping my eyes. As much fun as I knew we would have together, I really, really didn’t want us to leave just yet. 

“Mercy,” Adam tried again, noticeably reigning in his emotions. If Jesse were closer, she’d give him an A for effort. “Why are we here? And don’t tell me it’s because my team lost to you at CAGCTBPBT. We were on the road before dawn to get here by noon. We go back tomorrow for the same reason. There’s more to it than that.”

“You love me?”

“With everything that is in me.” He said it so that I felt it across our bond as well with my ears.

Surrounded by the warmth and intensity of his feelings, I felt a little silly. Sighing, I licked the remains of my cone perhaps a little too hard before looking up at my husband and mate. “Promise not to laugh?”

Eyebrows climbing, Adam said, “Even if I was, I think I’m too curious to laugh now.”

“This is all Jesse’s fault.”

“Jesse? She was playing on my team last time. If anything  _ I _ should be blaming her.” Adam’s eyebrows narrowed. “She didn’t lose on purpose to get a beach day with her boyfriend, did she?”

Despite all, I was the one who ended up laughing. “That’s a little complicated, even for a lovestruck teenager. And no one complained more about the pre-dawn wakeup call than Jesse.

“No, remember a few months ago when Jesse picked the Johnny Depp version of  _ Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street _ for movie night?” I said, facing him fully. 

__

He nodded. “I remember thinking we seem to like things with really long names, but go on.” 

__

“Do you also remember the beach scene? It’s kind of in the middle, and there’s this part where Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett are sitting on a towel on the beach while the kid plays, and they’re in those old fashioned bathing costumes.”

__

Now Adam’s eyebrows quirked. “We drove over five hours so you could recreate a movie scene? A five second movie scene.”

__

I chuckled. “Well when you put it that way...” But that wasn’t really the reason. “At first, sort of. But really--” What I wouldn’t give to be able to bury my suddenly awkward feelings in the guts of one of the cars waiting for me back home. “Mostly the scene reminded me of Evelyn.”

__

“Your foster mother.”

__

I nodded, unable to speak around the sudden lump in my throat. Wow, wasn’t expecting that.

__

One-handed, Adam drew me into his embrace. He wrapped his arms around me and went back to eating his ice cream. So I did, too, taking comfort in his warmth, his heartbeat against my side, his quiet assurance that I would talk about it when I was ready, and his complete lack of censure. Evelyn had died when I was thirteen, attempting the Change so she wouldn’t leave Brian, her husband and my foster father, when she died and he continued to live his near immortal, werewolf life. She died anyway, as most women attempting the Change do. Grief took Brian a year later when I was fourteen. They had been the only real parents I had known. My birth mother and father are still alive (sort of--don’t ask) and we were even on good terms (again, don’t ask for details) but they weren’t my parents they way Evelyn and Brian had been.

__

I popped the end of the cone into my mouth, crunching thoughtfully. There was a bottle of water waiting for me when I was done chewing. I took it from Adam’s hand but didn’t open it. Instead, I said, “When Evelyn was in high school she got a chance to do a semester of in California. She loved it. I mean, who wouldn’t? No parents, no werewolf politics, gorgeous weather, cute guys, minor chance of the Big One finally getting you. Very exciting.”

__

Adam, who had finished his ice cream long before me, made a sound of agreement.

__

“What she really fell in love with, though, was the beach. Anytime she could come out to the water, she did. Anything she could do on the water, she tried it. Apparently she was too busy with school to get really good at anything, but that didn’t matter. She was in love. According to her, it was the only thing she really missed when she came back to Aspen Creek. And whenever we’d watch a movie with a beach scene, even if it was an East Coast beach, she’d talk about how much she loved the sand and the surf. Her whole face would light up. Sometimes Brian would put on some Beach Boys for her, and we’d sing off-key and do silly dances around the house.”

__

Still silent, Adam sent warmth and love and comfort down our mating bond. They were happy memories, but it made me feel the loss of my foster parents keenly. After a moment, I even felt a surge of warmth and care and mild concern coming from the pack at large. They didn’t know exactly what was going on, only that I was sad. If they hadn’t already know that Adam was with me, there would probably be a half dozen wolves piling into cars to come see about me right now. Sometimes that knowledge is overwhelming. Right now it was good to know I had family at my back to soften the scars left by the family that was gone.

__

I twisted the top off the water and took a drink. “Anyway, the movie reminded me of Evelyn and--” 

__

“And here we are.”

__

“More or less.”

__

“Do you know if Brian ever managed to bring her to the coast after they got married?”

__

“I don’t know. He would have done anything for her, but you know how life is.”

__

Adam chuffed. “Sometimes it just conspires against every single one of your best laid plans.”

__

“Yup.” I pressed against Adam for a moment before wiggling out of his embrace and scooted over to the edge of the blanket. Popping up, I turned and said, “Race you to the waterline.”

__

Adam’s eyes narrowed. “What do you get if you win?”

__

“Even more bragging rights.” Werewolves are very, very competitive. Bragging rights were real.

__

“And what do I get if I win.”

__

I sent the image along our mating bond, because saying it out loud, even in our little secluded area, was more than I could manage at the moment.

__

Adam popped up from his seated position and started running. “Challenge accepted!” 

__

“No fair!” And coming from Coyote’s daughter, that’s saying something. 

__

His only response was the laugh that floated over his shoulder as I gave chase. I considered letting Adam win. It wasn’t like I wouldn’t enjoy his winning, after all. 

__

But bragging rights.

__

I put on an extra burst of speed, ready to try any trick it took to pull ahead of my husband and mate and friend. And soon to be sore loser.

__

Yup, it was a pretty amazing day.

__

__

Fin

__


End file.
